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First, there are only a few days left in the ACAs, so by all means procrastinate no more!

Second, I regret to say that I will be away until the middle of May. When I return, however, I hope to be able to pick up the pace of updates. We will then read of the thrilling German attempt to invade Britain! Thanks for your patience!

Now what would you need strategic bombers for? I thought you planned on invading Britain somewhere in the relatively near future, not to build up a long term strategic bombardment program.

Anyway i just want to say that this exellent piece of writing has kept me away from some good books i normally read before going to bed for some time now. I just caught up, and this is one of the most well written AARs i have ever read on these boards. Never mind the historical implausibility, i find it admirable that you explain the quirky game mechanics in such an exciting and believable(Again, compared to how believable the game itself is) way.

Kurt_Steiner - Correct! Feel free if you wish to display the award (as per dublish and SeleucidRex) in your signature. If not, then congratulations at any rate.

Pwn*Star - I realize that was perhaps a bit misleading. In Weltkriegschaft "canon" (analogous to real life), all types of projects go forward simultaneously, often taking years to come to fruition, just like real life. The game engine has some trouble representing this, however - forcing you to research individual technologies in short bursts. So although the game engine does not yet recognize any strategic bomber research, it is coming down the pipeline (and had been even before the start of the scenario, but with General Wever not being accidentally killed as he was in OTL, this development has continued faster). Thank you very much for your readership and the kind words about the AAR! Yes, the more I write this, the more I come to grasp the unique sort of challenge I have set before myself. The AI and game engine sure have the potential to do some wacky things! But then again, so did the real history, I suppose... In short, my aim is not that Weltkriegschaft be fully plausible, insofar as this would basically require the exact historical outcome. Rather, I aim to structure the AAR so that at the conclusion, people can look back and say: "That was the most plausible way to get from 1-1-36 to here." Next update going up now!

dublish - I should have known! Well-spotted, sir. Know that you are already 1/5 of the way toward the Sniper's Badge in Gold .

Chapter III: Part XXIV

With a throbbing roar, a flight of LDvB fighters passed low over the crenellated rooftops on their way toward the eastern outskirts of the city.

“Beautiful, yes?”

“Yes, Maggiore. Where is the car I was told you had sent for?”

“I’m afraid it had been taken by another officer, Herr Schwarzbeck. But Generale Bastico’s headquarters is not far. We can make it on foot.”

“Where is it?”

“The Semiramis Hotel -- one of Cairo’s finest. Come.”

“My bags, though -- I --”

“Ehi!” Giannoni shouted, flinging a stream of Italian-laced Arabic into the house in front of which Schwarzbeck was standing. It had been the residence of a British postal inspector, and was now staffed with Libyan servants for the convenience of Schwarzbeck and the Luftwaffe observer with whom he was sharing the house. Three of these, caramel-skinned Berbers known as Giovanni, Giorgio and Jacopo, appeared in their starched white uniforms carrying Schwarzbeck’s luggage.

“Let us go, if you are ready, Herr Schwarzbeck.” Giannoni, quickly proving the ablest of his Italian handlers, set off at a trot down the black pavement toward the heart of the district.

They were in the posh neighborhood of Kasr al-Dubara, a lush enclave of manicured gardens, trellised porches and cool fountains. Sultry perfumes and incenses seemed to pervade the air here, keeping the odors of the city at bay -- although these were tinged with the lingering piney smell of the tons of secret papers that had been burned as the Italians approached the city. High walls on two sides sheltered the neighborhood from much of the din of the streets. Its large, whitewashed homes, with their self-consciously arabesque architecture, mixed to strange effect with the dozen or so towering embassies built in a style so European as not to be out of place in Vienna.

The whole quarter was a ghost town. Unlike Cairo’s other districts, in which life had gone on more or less unabated since the Italians entered the city, Kasr al-Dubara had been full of British imperial officials and their hangers-on. These had fled in panic on the overcrowded trains for Port Said that ran into Cairo up until an hour before the city’s fall. Those who stayed -- mostly Turkish, Spanish and American nationals -- were staying well out of sight.

The majority of Cairo carried on with daily life in the wake of the city’s fall. In some neighborhoods, the Muslim Brotherhood was responsible for doling out food and ensuring the continuation of basic services.

Passing through Kasr al-Dubara’s deserted courts, Schwarzbeck, Giannoni and the Berbers found themselves skirting the edge of the neighborhood. Here, Schwarzbeck saw again the chaotic scene which had troubled him greatly when he first entered the city the day before. Italian soldiers were everywhere -- many of them asleep under even tiny wisps of shade, and only a tiny fraction of them in anything resembling a regulation uniform. At one street-corner, they had even strayed into Kasr al-Dubara itself, despite the efforts of the few military policemen that could be seen. Everywhere, the soldiers were laying about in a state of sheer exhaustion. Ahead, five or six men were bathing naked in a fountain, heedless of the Maggiore passing by. At the doorstep of a small church were half a dozen wounded British prisoners, one with a missing foot and three with thick bandages around their eyes. It was a sight now common throughout Cairo. Two nurses from what appeared to be a Catholic religious order were comforting them and changing their dressings. Near them, a huddle of well-dressed Egyptian men in red tarboosh caps was engaged in lively conversation.

The Italian invasion of Egypt had turned the tide in North Africa.

At the same time as glider-borne saboteurs were landing behind Holland’s Grebbe Line, 960 guns had opened up along a wide stretch of Egypt’s Western Desert. The Italians had chosen their far left flank, just east of a town called el-Alamein, as the location of their breakout from the lines that had become stagnated for nearly a month. Generale Ettore Bastico’s 165,000 men had caught the Kenyans facing them by surprise -- smashing them aside in an all-out race for the Cairo and the Suez.

Having increasingly wrested control of the air from an RAF torn between North Africa and the Home Islands, the Regia Aeronautica and Legion Dietrich von Bern harried British communication lines, making firm resistance difficult. For three weeks, the Italians had pushed east, daring not to relent for an hour, lest the delay give the British an opportunity to hold fast. They had averaged greater than 10 kilometers a day, backing the reeling British forces closer and closer to the Nile.

In the face of the unexpected Italian onslaught, General Kirke’s defensive lines had been repeatedly unable to find purchase in the vast sand expanses of the Western Desert. Sir Walter Mervyn St. George Kirke, a largely political choice for command of Britain’s forces in Egypt, had found himself ill-prepared to turn back a major invasion, and by September thirtieth was forced to report to London that the vital port of Alexandria had been surrounded. Nevertheless, the city and its garrison were well-supplied, and posed a constant threat to the Italian left flank as it pushed on toward Cairo.

General Sir Walter Mervyn St. George Kirke, overall commander of British forces in Egypt.

Bastico, Schwarzbeck was told in a communiqué from the Foreign Ministry a week into October, had pled with Mussolini to allow him time to regroup. Continued Royal Navy supremacy in the Mediterranean meant that little better than half his supplies were getting through, and the pace of fighting was driving his men to collapse. It was evident to Schwarzbeck that the Duce had overruled Bastico’s requests. The twin crises in the Netherlands and Egypt had thrown Stanley Baldwin’s government into fearful indecision. They had, it seemed, believed that they could maintain the initiative gained at Illizi and the Gulf of Sirte through the winter and into a massive Anglo-French offensive in the spring. Now, with the French unraveling in Algeria and British forces falling back from Cairo, defeatism stirred anew. As prospects of the war stabilizing evaporated, the name of Bastico loomed large as the bogeyman of the Allied press.

“We are here. Generale Bastico awaits you, Herr Schwarzbeck.”

“Thank you, Maggiore.”

They were under the awnings of a huge European-style hotel. Two smartly-uniformed guards stood watch at the entrance, checking Schwarzbeck’s papers thoroughly before tasking a young lieutenant with leading him deeper into the dimly-lit building.

Schwarzbeck paced behind him at a trot, through the foyer, up the grand staircase and around a corner into a mahogany-paneled corridor. There, two more soldiers stood guard at the entrance to one of the hotel’s conference suites. Another presentation of his papers, and the doors were thrown open. He found Bastico alone, sitting behind a desk, writing furiously. He paused, looking up at his visitor.

“Herr Schwarzbeck?”

“Generale Bastico. It is good to meet you.” Schwarzbeck offered the Italian his hand. Sitting there in his desert uniform, he appeared a rather small man, with a thin, graying mustache, and fierce dark eyes.

Generale Ettore Bastico in Egypt’s Western Desert.

“Please, sit.”

The German took a seat at the other side of Bastico’s desk.

“So, what can you tell me from Berlin?”

“I fear very little, for you see I have been in Africa since May. I have been an observer from Abyssinia to Algeria, and have spent the last three weeks with your men on the drive east.”

“I am here to understand your situation, and I do more fully every day. I am here, Generale, to report back to Germany what we can do to advance our cooperation -- to report back to Germany what you need for victory. What do you need, Generale Bastico?”

“I am afraid you have no power to give what I need, Herr Schwarzbeck.”

The German observer looked puzzled.

“Time.” Bastico leaned back in his chair slightly. “Time. My men need food, rest, ammunition. My trucks need fuel, my planes need parts. Only a quarter of the tankettes I started from el-Alamein with are still running, and dysentery is spreading. Time will allow me to regroup judiciously and regain all these things. But I expect that your HKK cannot offer us this most vital resource.”

“I’m afraid not, Generale. But, I can still convey the urgency of your situation to Berlin. If you had time -- say, six weeks -- do you think you could then be in a position to achieve victory?”

“I do. The timetables I am presently working under are simply not practical.”

“How so?”

“I have been given until dawn tomorrow to bring up my flanks. Then we are to continue the drive east. I am to have the Suez by the first of November.”

“And then?”

“And then Jerusalem.”

“How many British troops stand between?”

“I cannot state, obviously, what our military intelligence has told me, but right now, the number may not be greater than 35,000. I believe they are much fresher than we are, though.”

“How would time help, then? They are bound to only bolster that with men from Algeria in the coming weeks.”

The telephone on Bastico’s desk rang. Gesturing that Schwarzbeck could stay, he picked up the receiver and answered.

Schwarzbeck was now hearing through multiple channels of the likelihood that British troops would be withdrawn from Algeria and sent to defend the strategically-vital Suez Canal in the event of a total French collapse. Lieutenant General Carton de Wiart, the colorful and combative commander of the British forces in Algeria, had quarreled bitterly with his French counterparts, and openly derided the fighting spirit of the French Army. He had wasted no opportunity to burn bridges with the commanders he deemed overcautious, uncommitted or disloyal. Whitehall had been more or less oblivious to the problem, failing to dispatch someone to try to mend things until the functionality of the Anglo-French alliance in Algeria was in tatters.

Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, at his Tunis headquarters, early autumn, 1936.

Aside from Carton de Wiart’s corps and the few sturdy French units around Tunis, the Allied presence in western North Africa had dissipated to almost nothing. Where at Illizi Carton de Wiart was able to count on an entire French army to bar the desert passes deep into Algeria, there were now only a handful of brigades of any fighting quality, and these had been swept aside by Tenente Generale De Simone’s oversized corps as it attacked on September twenty-sixth. Indeed, De Simone’s small motorized force, traveling across Algeria’s one suitable highway, had already reached the sea along the border of Spanish North Africa. Three cavalry spearheads were driving for the coast as well, and the fall of Mers-el-Kébir could not be far off. Further, the Italians had managed to exploit a gap in Anglo-French lines in Tunisia, reaching the sea there as well, and isolating Carton de Wiart in the north from Zuara and the forces with which Mountbatten was making a concerted drive toward Tripoli. The danger to the trapped men was minimal -- resupplied as they were from the sea, and supported by aircraft of the RAF and Fleet Air Arm. Yet the simple fact was that Zuara was of no strategic importance -- and, the British reasoned, if the French no longer had the stomach of for the fight, then neither was Tunis. And so, the Pact had become certain that Mountbatten and his 8th Indian Army -- in reality little more than the 8th Indian Infantry Division and the brigade-sized Royal West African Frontier Force -- would soon be removed from their pocket around Zuara and shipped east to bolster the defenses around the Suez Canal.

Bastico hung up the telephone. “The whole idea, so far as I was told, of recent operations in North Africa,” he began slowly, resuming the conversation where it left off, “was to use our advantage in numbers to keep the English and the French off-balance before their spring offensive. An evacuation from Tunisia would keep them off-balance. As you have surely seen, we are now in a position where a counteroffensive would throw us off-balance. And yet I am being ordered forward with all haste. I need, Herr Schwarzbeck, an ideal six weeks to restore my army. To work with any less time is to sabotage oneself.”

“Surely the Best is the enemy of the Good, Generale.”

Bastico smiled at the proverb, but said nothing.

“To even consider time you yourself have admitted I cannot give you,” Schwarzbeck continued, “may be to lose sight of the most urgent goal. I will convey to Berlin the conditions here, and the advantage that may be gained by time to regroup. To that end, I must urgently express the Foreign Ministry’s desire that I am able to liaise more closely with your staff, and that I be lodged in the Hotel Semiramis. My baggage is downstairs.”

“I am sure that my staff can find a place for you here.”

Schwarzbeck felt a surge of relief. He had heard that Bastico might prove very difficult about such a request.

“Herr Schwarzbeck, let me leave you with this, before I return to my work, so that you might understand the expectations that have been laid in Rome. I ask that you do your best that such expectations do not spread to Berlin. This is the order drafted for me that will go out tomorrow morning in my name to more than a hundred and fifty thousand men under my command.” Heaving a sigh, Bastico lifted from his desk a yellow paper and handed it to Schwarzbeck.

You have fought like lions of the desert. Your enemy is driven before you in disorder. Today we set out on the great push for the Suez Canal, the artery which carries the lifeblood of the British Empire. Every effort must be exerted to attack, and to leave the English no chance to take away the our advantage. Give all, brave men, and we will spend Christmas in the land of Christ’s birth.

I love the detail of this AAR. It's really unlike anything I've ever read, even in memoirs. Everything seems so real, like I'm actually there observing Bastico's exhausted army.

And, regarding my earlier question, for the Italians to be advancing in Algeria that must mean you went for total conquest in France. But if the Luftwaffe isn't giving the Italians very generous support in Egypt then I think this should be the end of their fortunes. You have to pulverize the British with a few wings of TAC for the Italian AI to do any good.